Issue 21, 2017

Towards a full understanding of regioisomer effects of indene-C60 bisadduct acceptors in bulk heterojunction polymer solar cells

Abstract

Indene-C60 bisadduct (IC60BA), which can offer a significantly higher open-circuit voltage (Voc) than monoadducts, has become the research focus as electron acceptor materials in polymer solar cells (PSCs) in recent years. However, despite its popularity, IC60BA have always been applied in PSCs as mixture of several regioisomers and the nature of this mixture has never been fully investigated and understood. Herein, for the first time, 12 major regioisomers of IC60BA were isolated and a full investigation was carried out with respect to their structure, abundance, solubility and their corresponding photovoltaic performance. The results show that the PSCs based on these regioisomeric structures present very diverse PCE and their photovoltaic performance was dramatically affected not only by the relative indene positions but also by the steric orientation of the two indene groups. Electrochemical studies further revealed that the effect of energetic disorder inside the IC60BA regioisomers on their photovoltaic performance is insignificant when applied in PSCs. However, the steric structures and solubility of the regioisomers were found to have significant impact on the morphology and bulk properties of the active layer of PSCs, which give rise to very different PCE of devices based on IC60BA regioisomers with different structures.

Graphical abstract: Towards a full understanding of regioisomer effects of indene-C60 bisadduct acceptors in bulk heterojunction polymer solar cells

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
23 Feb 2017
Accepted
24 Apr 2017
First published
24 Apr 2017

J. Mater. Chem. A, 2017,5, 10206-10219

Towards a full understanding of regioisomer effects of indene-C60 bisadduct acceptors in bulk heterojunction polymer solar cells

T. Cao, N. Chen, G. Liu, Y. Wan, J. D. Perea, Y. Xia, Z. Wang, B. Song, N. Li, X. Li, Y. Zhou, C. J. Brabec and Y. Li, J. Mater. Chem. A, 2017, 5, 10206 DOI: 10.1039/C7TA01665D

To request permission to reproduce material from this article, please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

If you are an author contributing to an RSC publication, you do not need to request permission provided correct acknowledgement is given.

If you are the author of this article, you do not need to request permission to reproduce figures and diagrams provided correct acknowledgement is given. If you want to reproduce the whole article in a third-party publication (excluding your thesis/dissertation for which permission is not required) please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

Read more about how to correctly acknowledge RSC content.

Social activity

Spotlight

Advertisements